Chris Kettle
CEO & Co-Founder at my247.com.au and my247.mobi and Treasurer, Australian Interactive Media Industry Association

Written by Hannah Suarez on 2008-10-15

Tell us about my247.com.au in your own words

We are a social networking site built around entertainment and we provide a ‘What’s On’ and ‘Where To Go’ entertainment guides online, on mobile phones and on social networks, and we have just released an iPhone application. We give people a personalised entertainment guide for their favourite restaurants, bars, nightclubs, movies, gigs and events that also allows them to tag and create a guide and share with their friends.

What about the my247.mobi?

The .mobi has been our mobile site since April 2007. We see our future as a location-based mobile service – we’ve had our mobile site there and the traffic has been increasing. However, we are now using that as our international domain name. On a PC, if you type in my247.mobi, you get a PC version. If you type it on your mobile phone, it auto-detects and gives you a mobile phone version. As we’ve seen in Japan and around the world, there are more mobile phone users than broadband users. It’s a personalised device, it’s always with you, and it’s always on. The future is mobile.

What do you see happening in the next five years for the industry that my247 is in?

I would find it hard to tell you what’s happening in 12 months time. It’s a very dynamic space. It’s like the iPhone as well – what we are seeing with the iPhone is that more people are using the mobile phone for data and location access. In terms of local directories, GPS in all phones is just a matter of time. With the my247 iPhone application, you press one button and it shows you what’s near right now. Traditionally, our service has been like Yellow Pages where a business will pay more to be at the top of the list, this model has changed and will continue to in five years time.

Mobile is a complementary business, like web complements print. I think that way you consume – I don’t think mobile will replace any of these, but for media companies it should be built into their strategy. The handsets are getting better, more useable, bigger screens, longer battery life, faster, so you are seeing mobile as the definite push-forward that way.

What are the most important/valuable skills that graduates can bring to your industry?

It’s a very fast-moving industry. The fantastic thing about web and mobile is that it’s the state of technology is very accessible. You can be reading websites from the heart of these industries such as TechCrunch and you can be up-to-date with the latest technologies. AIMIA, the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association, has a Queensland chapter and they have connections with companies who will do work experience. They have a student competition which is about to happen so students can submit their work and deal with companies such as my247, Wotif or MySpace for example. Being involved with real world companies will get you jobs.

How would you rate the performance of Brisbane-based media organisations in comparison to other national and international media hubs?

There are a lot of Brisbane companies that are mainly advertising online instead of mobile so there needs to be a lot of education in this area. There is a responsibility for companies such as ours to educate others that there is this cool stuff that you can do with mobile.

You have done some travelling around the UK. Wasn’t there a mobile 2.0 conference in Spain, Europe?

We launched our international site in Barcelona at the Mobile 2.0 conference. Mobile2 started in San Francisco. They had their first European one so we took that opportunity to launch the my247 Barcelona guide to the mobile audience. The future of my247 will work in any locality. The next phase is that people from those countries will start maintaining their communities themselves, like Wikipedia.

So I got your name through 60Sox’s Justin Brow – how did you get involved? Out of curiosity.

I know Justin through AIMIA and Mobile Monday. Mobile Monday is a monthly networking event around the world so we are looking to start one in Brisbane. We had an AIMIA Queensland mobile event about six weeks ago. We had six Brisbane mobile companies have never been in the same room together, which is crazy. So we are looking at using AIMIA Queensland to be making the bridge – having networking events. So there’s a whole list of companies in AIMIA Queensland that are doing this led by Michael Burke of Liquid Interactive.